Observations

I observed people in various settings in the ten minute window before classes began. I directly observed and asked questions of the following people: William Song ’13 in the ten minutes before a 10am lecture, Elizabeth O’Grady in a dorm kitchen immediately prior to her class, and Wenwei Ho walking toward a class. I also anonymously (and without their knowledge) observed several people who were in the hallway and lecture room immediately prior to a HCI lecture and a small language class I’m in.

Observations I made include the following:

There are a handful of people who arrive early enough before lectures that they have to wait for the previous class to end before they can enter the room. This is particulary true of people watiting for a class held in a large lecture hall like CS 104, where it can take some time for all the students from the previous class to shuffle their way to the aisle and leave through the back doors.

Before the first class of one’s day some people have the choice of grabbing breakfast before class and running for it or making it to class in time and going hungry. It’s hard to wake up extra early to get breakfast at a dining hall, and people find that stopping for meals often takes longer than planned. This dilemma repeats itself for independent students cooking their own lunch.

People who arrive early to lectures are extremely likely to use their phones to check their emails (though in HCI and other COS classes it seems a larger than normal fraction might be using their laptops instead). In my language class I observed relatively little email-checking and many people instead taking the time to flip through the textbook, presumably to review material from the previous lesson.

Given that it is graduate school decision season now, one of my interviewees revealed that he spends those few minutes every hour checking the gradcafe website to see if his desired schools have mailed out acceptance and rejection letters to other people.

The second-most common sight (after email) on people’s computers in the minutes between classes was a tossup between facebook and PrincetonFML; in both cases this was just a way to while away the time, not because users had a burning desire for information from either of those sites.

Professors and grad students teaching classes were almost always there ten minutes before their class was due to start. In the case of classes involving presentations they normally spent that time behind the lectern setting up their computer; in smaller classes on the other hand they spent that time chatting with students, returning graded assignments turned in the previous week, or flipping through the textbook.

Some people always arrive late to a class. In some cases this means that the professor will not start the actual material for the class until a couple minutes into the allotted class time. In the case of HCI this also means that the rear corners and aisle seats of the lecture hall get very crowded, since in that lecture hall in particular it is difficult to get past seated people to the center of  a row.

Brainstorming Ideas

1. Reminders for readings: Extracts the chapters or page numbers from the course syllabi and tells you so that you can put your bag down and immediately skim through the reading you should have done.
2. Late alarm: a mobile app that tracks your position in the ten minutes before class and if you’re falling behind schedule (because you’re trying to run errands/print stuff/pick up mail between classes) it will set off an alarm indicating you should drop everything and run.
3. Lesson summaries: Write short summaries of the main takeaway from class while it’s still fresh in your mind (as you walk to the next class), to help with later revision.
4. Fitness monitor: Many people don’t get enough exercise on campus, so a way to track the distance and speed they walk between classes and encourage them to walk faster / run between classes to get more exercise (and help them turn up early to class).
5. Stretch for success: For people with excess time between classes / successive classes in the same room – their laptops would lock during that period and show exercise videos to encourage them to strech or do light exercise in between classes to improve their fitness and alertness.
6. Walk with friends: an app that lets you know if there are friends who will be walking most of the way between classes so that you can wait up or arrange to meet them
7. Face name quizzes: an app that quizzes you on princeton-facebook pictures / names / majors / other basic biographic data of people in small seminars with you so that you can get to know who your classmates are.
8. Flashcards: people already do these in language classes but more generally small fact-recall quizzes for other classes too, so you can revise your work on the go (can be combined with no. 7)
9. Food ordering: select dishes from that day’s menu at the dining hall and have it packaged and ready for pickup either in the dining hall or somewhere between classes.
10. Warm walk: app to indicate the best walking route through campus between classes, taking into account the user’s preferences on tradeoffs like taking the absolute shortest route vs. taking a longer route through heated buildings in winter or rain.
11. Know-it-all: app to look at syllabus for a seminar you’re walking towards and read you relevant wikipedia pages so that you appear to have really broad knowledge of the material
12. Magic mirror: Use a phone’s front facing camera to check your hair / makeup between classes so you can walk in looking good.
13. Engineered coincidence: have a crush on someone? Use ICE / facebook to figure out their class schedule then position yourself to make sure you ‘accidentally’ meet them regularly between classes.
14. Shared bulletin board: set up projector in lecture room; students (and instructors) can type messages / doodle / paste in webcomics for everyone to see – encourage class bonding.
15. Coffee pit stop: if you pass by many possible spots to grab coffee (Frist, WWS, Equad cafe) on your way to class, this looks at the queue at each spot and tells you where to buy coffee for the least delay.
16. Screen calibration: a video feed from a camera at the back of the class displayed at the lectern so that professors can quickly step through the various lighting settings they plan to use  (dimming the front for a powerpoint presentation, or bringing up the lights when using the chalkboard) and verify that the brightness / text size is enough for students at the back to be able to read the screen or board.
17. Bus or walk: the campus buses are fast enough but run infrequently, so this would track the real-time bus location data (which is already available online) and recommend whether students would get to their next class faster on a bus or by walking.

Selection

The ideas I decided to prototype were the fitness monitor and coffee pit stop. I liked the fitness monitor because it appealed to me as a ‘gamification’ way of optimizing my life, allowing users to become both fitter and more punctual. The coffee pit stop seemed like it was very widely applicable – many people think they should be able to get coffee between classes but end up waiting in line too long; it also seemed easier to solve than the related problem of grabbing food on the way to class (see observations) since there are so very many coffee-selling places on campus.

Prototypes

Fitness monitor: gallery

Coffee pit stop: gallery

Testing

I decided to test the fitness monitor app with users. I gave them a one sentence description of its purpose: “This is a mobile app to help you get some exercise between classes”. I then let them step through the screens independently and observed what they did and where they became confused. I also mimicked an alert noise when in the simulation they reached their destination.

Nicolas Crowell ’14

• Surmised when the ‘countdown will begin’ screen was presented that he should start running to his next class but seemed a little uncertain about that.
• Raised the question of ‘why would I look at this before every class’
• Did not of his own volition go into the map view; when he did see it after going through the simulation once he recommended that additional social functionality could go into making it more interesting
  • Since people already know their way around campus that view is not very useful as a map on its own

Neo Christopher Chung GS

• Was also confused by the ‘Start Over’ button
  • “I don’t want to start over and just run back I went to McCosh to do something”
• Exhibited more interest in my other prototype (for coffee spots) than this one
  • On the whole didn’t seem like he would actually want to run around campus
• Was annoyed by the login screen: “My phone should remember who I am”
• Thought the text screen with current location and destination was too cluttered.

Peter Szerzo ’13

• Thought login screen and final screen after reaching destination were too wordy.
• Was initially confused by the ‘check back after 4:15’ wording.
• Was not sure when the beeping at destination was meant to indicate he’d arrived or indicated he’d gone over the target time.
• Preferred the map view to the text view for checking position while on the move

Insights

People need more incentive to physically run between classes. Perhaps adding the ability to share your run speeds with facebook friends could make the system more competitive and encourage users to run faster between classes. Another possibility might be to display the records set by other users on the same route. An interactive map view where users can see each others’ running pace in real time might also help with this.

The ‘timeout’ functionality (i.e. this only works in the period between classes) and the function of the ‘Start Over’ button are not completely clear; in a future version I might do away with that button and instead display either the completion screen or the time-to-destination screen depending just on the time it is viewed (though that might raise different usability discovery problems). A ‘close map’ button might also be helpful, since the text view can indicate not only the destination building but also a room number, which could be useful. As for the timeout during classes I might make that more obvious with an overlay masking out the controls during the periods in which the user is expected to be in class, instead of the “check back after 4:15” wording in the screen users found misleading.

The wording in many places should also be changed, generally by making the screens less wordy and less cluttered. When laying out my design I’d thought it was already quite spartan but it seems users would like it even more so.

The audio feedback might need to be reconsidered, since it could be confusing. One possibility might be to have a success tone or no signal at all to indicate that they’ve arrived at their destination, and an alarm tone to indicate their target time is up or that they’re going to be late to class.